A monster most every weekday. Three adventure seeds a post.
Because Pathfinder and 3.5 are more fun than work.
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Friday, May 15, 2015

Marrowstone Golem

My skepticism of fantasy metals and minerals is well established.(Never mind that it makes
no sense.Some poor author introduces,
say, biron—“It’s like, twice as
magnetic as iron”—and I’m all, “NOPE!”…yet apparently I can talk for hours on
the mating habits of sphinxes.So
basically I’m a petulant child.)

That said, a mineral that radiates darkness or death is a
pretty well-established fantasy trope.(Off
the top of my head Forgotten Realms has darkstone and sickstone, and mordite
has popped up in at least three novels of The
Dresden Files.)So lazurite/marrowstone
isn’t an unreasonable creation.Plus the
marrowstone golem (statted up by Russ Taylor for the Inner Sea Bestiary) is actually pretty cool.A golem that radiates a necrotic field and
raises its victims as ghouls and ghasts is a pretty dope construct, especially
as a guardian of a powerful undead creature or a demipower of death.

Two further pieces of interest: In the Golarion setting lazurite
loses its potency outside the necropolis where it is mined…except when bound
into a marrowstone golem.If marrowstone
is similarly located in your campaign, marrowstone golems become a fascinating
combination of ambassador, evangelist, and weapon for the undead nation that
possesses them.(Imagine an undead
city-state falling to crusaders, only to send out its marrow golems in all
directions, like mindless, contagious Kal-Els from an evil Krypton).Second, the ghouls created by a marrowstone
golem are free-willed and may even retain their class levels…so while the golem
will always hew to its master’s instructions, the colonies of undead it creates
might not.

Marrowstone golems
don’t exist on Hearth…but they do exist in the Greymoor, Hearth’s waterlogged
version of the Ethereal Plane.They
guard temples to a power of mists and the restless dead who no longer seems to
exist.But the ghasts these golems have
created are now the Greymoor’s primary inhabitants.

A mohrg has become
addicted to the necrotic field of a marrowstone golem.He leaves the golem’s side only when his
unnatural desire for murder is too strong to ignore.In any other city the mohrg’s movements would
have been tracked and the creature dispatched, but the mummy-worshipping drow
of Daxil have no City Watch.Folk too
poor to afford private guards will sometimes band together to hire foreign mercenaries
to aid them, though—even surface dwellers, if they get desperate enough.

During the sack of
Tesh Kumar, the Hand of Plague sent four marrowstone golems out of the
subterranean city (all the ghast hierophant could spare from the defense of his
inner sanctum) to continue Tesh’s legacy.One golem lies buried in rubble in the earthquake-racked Caverns of
Sapphire.One has been destroyed, but
not before overrunning the svirfneblin settlement of Tukh with diminutive
undead.One of the marrowstone golems is
now trailed by a coterie of ghoul religious fanatics—half of whom are trying to
maintain their faith in the Phoenix despite their transformation, and half who
have eagerly embraced Most Black Yasmet.And one remains unaccounted for…

Alas, no entry today—travel and festivities ate up my
writing time. Thanks for your patience. I’ll fill this in soon.

Speaking of festivities, any day you go to your
professor’s retirement party and two women’s studies profs come up to you and
say, “You don’t remember us, but 15 years ago you DJed our party and you were
awesome” is a good one.

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.